Advanced Use of Markdown

This section expands upon the basic information given in the section titled 'Enhancing Text With Markdown' to give those with special requirements the information needed to make the most of Markdown. If you don't recognise, or don't need, the formatting listed below then you should feel free to skip this section and return to it as and when needed.

(Even more) Advanced options are available. See the Further Reading
section.

In some texts, for instance in poetry and verse, it is often necessary to insert line breaks. Trying to do so with the return key will not give the intended effect as by default the lines will be run together to create a paragraph.

The Enhancing Text With Markdown document gives instructions for creating web links and inserting images. It may not be obvious that these can be combined to create images that are also clickable links.

[the google search engine][google]

![the google logo][logo]

Above are a standard web link and image. By placing the image where the link text would be found you end up with this:

[![the google logo][logo]][google]

This line above, in combination with the following link definitions elsewhere in the document:

If you are already proficient in HTML then there may be occasions when Markdown does not allow you as much control as you are used to. Luckily Markdown is designed for this eventuality and allows you to embed HTML directly within Markdown formatted text.

* <small>small text</small>* <big>big text</big>

small text

big text

Note that the HTML markup co-exists with the Markdown code for bullet lists. This frees you from the mundane task of writing complex HTML for basic formatting features such as paragraphs and lists while still allowing you to access the full power of HTML in specific situations.

If, unlike in the section above, you wish the HTML you enter to be displayed exactly as you typed it, rather than processed as HTML then you can start each line with four space characters.

<p>A paragraph in <b>HTML</b> displayed as code</p>

This also works for displaying computer code:

print "Command-line arguments: (@ARGV)\n";

As this formatting is often used for computer program listings and other text which may plausibly contain the characters that Markdown uses to indicate different types of formatting, Markdown's formatting is switched off for these lines:

If you wish to use any of the special characters that trigger Markdown formatting without them being processed simply precede them with a backslash character (\). This is known as 'escaping' a character. The backslash is not displayed but the character immediately following it is shown, exactly as entered.